Old Blog

Hey Drobo, What Do You Knowbo?

Disk space, like puberty, is a problem that’s unlikely to disappear until we see some major technological revolutions (holocubes and voice-modulators, respectively), and for my money, again, as with puberty, life’s too short to worry about these things when there are other, bigger and better things to focus on. Like food.

You’d think by now, that they’d have HDD enclosures down, right? Wrong. Over the last 3-4 years, I’ve bought four or five external HDD enclosures, and with every single one I’ve been disappointed by something or other. The 300GB LaCie D2 vibrates too much, the 500GB LaCie Porche has the oddest sleeping pattern, the 250GB Achmed’s Grill og Fastpladelager Fabrik broke in a couple of months from a bad connection and the 1TB Western Digital MyWorldBook gets confused when you try to do too much at once and simply crashes on itself. No matter where I turned, or what I heard of positive things from other people, each disk I bought was hellbent on plaguing me in some new manner. Awesome.

And since I moved to my MacBook Pro as my primary workstation, I’ve moved all of my data onto our LAN (1TB WD MyWorldBook NAS, 300GB LaCie D2 hooked into a 500GB Apple Time Capsule). This works really well for most things (when the 1TB NAS doesn’t require a hard reset because I accidentally tried deleting AND moving at the same time!), and allows us to access music, photos and movies from all our various devices.

But, wait… I have all my precious photos, music, document archive and what not on the LAN... That means… There’s no BACKUP! ARGH! PAANIIIC!

I’ve just been waiting for one of those disks to fail in some way, wiping out years of work and irreplaceable memories. Not sure Rikke would respond too well to that… Hell, I’m not sure I’d respond too well to that.

So I’ve been eyeing the Drobo for a while now, refraining from buying one simply because they’re so damned expensive here in Denmark. You may have seen my whines about that on Twitter once or twice…

But then this week I finally decided it was time, whatever the cost. On the official site it’s a splendid $500. Humac—the Danish ‘Apple Stores’—sells it at 4900dkr ($890!) and 3G sells them at 3500dkr ($636). I finally found Cyberport, a German reseller, which listed it at €450 ($610), but dropped their price to €399 ($540) on tuesday. So I ordered one immediately, which came out to €412 = 3070dkr = $558; pretty cheap, everything considered.

Two days later, it’s sitting here, snugly next to my MacBook, working away on getting all my data onto it.